I'm on board with the plan
@GhostOfPGA mentioned in another thread for getting Jimmy Butler and Jrue Holiday.
At the draft:
New Orleans gets ET, Harkless, Leonard and our 2019 1st
Portland gets Jrue Holiday and Solomon Hill
Portland buys a mid-late 2nd round pick to add a cheap minimum contract to the end of the bench
In free agency:
Dame convinces Jimmy Butler to come here so we have to work out a sign-and-trade.
Philly gets CJ McCollum
Portland gets Jimmy Butler
This makes it very difficult to do anything else because we'd be at roughly $130 million (haven't done the actual math yet) with only 10 players but we'd be hard capped at around $139 million.
This is where the
@BonesJones Taurean Prince trade comes into play. The point of this trade is to relieve salary, not necessarily to get Prince.
Atlanta gets Solomon Hill and Portland 2020 1st (Top-10 protected)
Portland gets Taurean Prince
That trade saves us $9 million and would give us about $18 million in space between the hard cap and what we need to accomplish.
Where does that leave us? We'd still have 10 players under contract so we'd need to sign 4-5 guys.
Starters
Dame
Jrue
Butler
Collins
Nurk (eventually)
Reserves
Simons
Trent
Prince
Skal
2nd round pick
That starting lineup is a contender. The bench on the other hand would still need some major work. We'd have a couple of paths to go down from here. The Full-MLE would be opened up so the question becomes do we want one more really good player added to that with minimum contracts filling out the other spots, do we split it up into smaller pieces to offer two different players part of it, or do we still try to sign some combo of Hood/Kanter/Curry? We could probably find a way to use both the Full-MLE and the Bi-Annual Exception (about $3.5 million).